NOVELIST Candace Bushnell created Carrie Bradshaw and still loves her Sex And The City girl, but now there’s a new heroine in town...

She made her name creating sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw but when it comes to her latest work, novelist Candace Bushnell is more than ready to leave her racier writing behind her. “There’s so much porn now, it seems pointless to write about sex,” she says frankly.

“Teenagers know more about sex from the internet than I do! In fact, everyone knows so much that I don’t think writing those scenes – unless it’s Fifty Shades Of Grey – has the same impact.”

It’s an interesting stance for the author and journalist whose frank mid-1990s column for the New York Observer about the dating experience of Bushnell and her friends became the basis for the TV series and global phenomenon Sex And The City.

There’s so much porn now, it seems pointless to write about sex

Candace Bushnell

“Bad sex is interesting, good sex is cringy but when I’m writing a book, a sex scene is a bit ‘whoooah, now I have to think about what they look like,’” she says.

“I don’t really even like seeing sex scenes that much in movies.”

Now 56, Candace doesn’t strike you as someone who could ever be made to blush.

The quintessential New Yorker, despite her Connecticut upbringing, Bushnell talks at speed – answering at least three questions for every one asked – and while she says she often doesn’t get recognised in the street, she clearly isn’t shy about attracting attention.

“Occasionally, people hear my loud, obnoxious voice and they’ll turn around to see this person using an outdoor voice inside and they’ll be like, ‘Ooh, there’s Candace Bushnell,’” she says in a stage whisper.

Compared to “Jane Austen with a Martini”, her bestselling books including The Carrie Diaries, Lipstick Jungle and Four Blondes have all inspired TV shows, while SATC’s Carrie Bradshaw remains one of the most iconic characters of her generation.

“She made people consider the life of a single woman in a different way,” says Bushnell with uncommon understatement.

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The Sex And The City girls were famous for their cocktails and designer heels

Now, she is hoping the heroine of her latest novel, Killing Monica, PJ Wallis (known as Pandy to her friends), will enjoy similar success.

Pandy is a novelist who lives a glamorous life in New York, having created an iconic character whose incarnation on screen outshone the original written version.

Those who have already read the book are pointing to echoes of the author’s own life in the storyline.

So how does Candace feel about the comparisons? “It’s flattering because Pandy slept with movie stars and I never have!” she exclaims, before adding, “I think people will always draw parallels.

When I had to decide what I was going to write next, I was thinking that the books that seem to interest people are the ones where the writer has done something unique in their lives, like Cheryl Strayed in Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love. And I thought, ‘What do I have in my life that is a little bit different?’ and decided, ‘Well, I created this iconic character.’

Then I read Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, which is about a fictionalised version of Roth – he’s written a novel and everyone hates him, an old lady attacks him on the bus and everyone is trying to get money from him, and it’s so brilliantly funny.

I just thought it was a great conceit for a novel, someone who has created a character who is larger than life that they can’t get away from, a sort of Frankenstein thing.”

Yet despite drawing on her own experiences for inspiration, Candace insists that, unlike Pandy, she doesn’t feel the desire to take a knife to her own most famous character any time soon. “Really, The Carrie Diaries is the only time I’ve gone back to a character I’ve written before,” she says.

“I don’t even think about Carrie [when I’m developing a new book]. For me, all my characters are incredible and I love PJ as much as I love Carrie.”

The novel opens with Pandy’s divorce settlement being finalised.

So did Bushnell find inspiration in her own separation? [Her marriage to Charles Askegard, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, ended after a decade in 2012.] “I did get divorced; my divorce was uneventful but, of course, what one discovers when one gets divorced is that, like when you’re in an accident and suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork to tell you how they broke their foot once, people tell you about their own experiences,” she says.

“I heard so many stories about horrible divorces – unbelievable stuff where the man will not let the woman go without demanding money – so I used those. If I used stuff from my life, literally there would be nothing to write about. I get up. I work. It’s all I do. Occasionally I go to a party.”

Yet there’s one similarity between Candace and her latest heroine that she’ll freely admit to. PJ is a novelist desperate to write about someone other than Monica, to be taken seriously as a “literary writer”, and Candace does have aspirations of moving on from chick lit.

“I have an idea to write historical fiction about a girl in the 1700s in the American Revolution – but nobody wants it!

“Killing Monica originally had a very ambitious plot where I wanted the character to fake her own death, disguise herself as a nun and go into New York society.

I thought it was hilarious but my publishers did not want that either.

I would get emails that said, ‘No nuns and no magic and no secret staircases!’

“I had this other thing where a character took a concoction of jimson weed, which causes hallucinations, so that she thought she was 17 and was acting like that but she was actually 50. Again they were like ‘no’.

“I liked it but it’s experimental fiction and people get nervous so it all got shaved away by the final draft, because Candace Bushnell isn’t known for writing surreal books.”

Has she considered writing under another name, like JK Rowling has? (The Harry Potter creator publishes crime novels using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.) “I’ve often thought about it, but one doesn’t dash off a novel in a couple of weeks, these are big, big-time commitments – two years at least,” she explains.

“I make a living at this. You can do that when you’ve sold enough to be richer than the Queen. If I were really, really rich I could take a chance and write under a different name but I don’t think that time will come so I’m stuck with me.”

Candace Bushnell’s new novel Killing Monica (Little, Brown & Company, £14.99) is out now in hardback. To order, see Express Bookshop (expressbookshop.co.uk).